Cathryn Essinger's sixth book of poetry, Telling the Bees, references folklore belief that bee hives must be kept informed about major events in the life of the family. When the beekeeper dies, someone must inform the bees and invite them to stay, assuring them they will be treated well. In these poems, bees serve as a conduit between the present and the past, between generations, and between species as well.
About the Author :
Cathryn Essinger is the author of five previous books of poetry--most recently The Apricotand the Moon and Wings, Or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight?, both from Dos MadresPress. My Dog Does Not Read Plato was published by Main Street Rag along with What IKnow About Innocence which includes a video poem, Dark Flower, by her son Dave Essinger. Her first book, A Desk in the Elephant House, won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The New England Review, Ecotone, Terrain.org, Rattle, The MacGuffin, and other journals. Theyhave been nominated for Pushcarts and Best of the Net, featured on The Writer's Almanac, and reprinted in American Life in Poetry. She lives in Troy, Ohio where she raises butterflies and tries to live up to her dog and cat's extravagant expectations.
Review :
"It's a simple art this honey making, if you know the recipe" reads the epigraph for Cathy Essinger's new collection Telling the Bees. Indeed, Essinger knows the recipe to all topics
poetry-the sweet and the painful, the mouth-watering and the dangerous. We're told in the first poem, "Here is the land of remembered things- / memory's dark home." In these precise and powerful poems, Essinger bears witness across generations to the care-giving and traditions that define a home, as well as to the ailments and wars that threaten it. Populated with creatures, trees, flowers, food, and-of course, bees-these poems bless us. May we proclaim with the poet, "[W]e are doing our best / to live a life worth dying for."
--Marjorie Maddox, author of Small Earthly SpaceAfter reading Cathryn Essinger's Telling the Bees, I feel as if I've taken a master class with a master. From conversations with trees and caterpillars, to rescuing geraniums and critters, to helping a lost turtle find its way home-the poems are magical. They honor moments that shape a life and invite gratitude, such as baking with her grandmother, relishing memories of her mother's knitting, and tending her beloved late father's bees collecting honey, "Nothing to do but lick my fingers/and laugh, and in that moment/I know I am blessed."
--Neil Carpathios, author of Lifeaholics AnonymousTelling the Bees is not only a book about memory, but it is a book that deserves to be remembered. When future readers want to know what it felt like to live when we did, to have had parents and grandparents who lived through depressions and wars, who nonetheless brought up the kids to be good people, brought them up to appreciate the incredible bounty of the world that was given to them, this is the book they will take off the shelf. Cathryn Essinger tells the bees that the beekeeper has died and that she is the new beekeeper. She accepts the responsibility of caring for the physical world, for her home, her family, pets, birds, and insects. She gives her readers the best of that world distilled into poems that wait for us, preserved like rare fruit in clear glass jars. We come away from reading these poems grateful for their existence and grateful to Essinger for giving them to us.
--George Franklin, author of A Man Made of Stories
